England's Dreaming: The "Sex Pistols" and Punk Rock [Hardcover]

If, like me, you missed the first wave of punk (hey, I was only born in 1973!), but fell in love with the music later, you gotta read this book.

Savage tells the tale of English punk (with some reference to what was happening in the USA, but as the title says, this is _England's_ Dreaming), starting from the backgrounds of those involved, through to the end of the 70's, after the collapse of the Sex Pistols and the death of Sid Vicious.

As you might guess from the title (which is of course from a line in the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen"), it is the Sex Pistols that are the primary focus of all this. But there's plenty here about The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, and plenty of less famous but essential bands, like The Slits, X-Ray Spex, Siouxsie & The Banshees, etc. And I should add that there is an extensive index with discographies of many, many groups.

I'm not sure exactly what Jon Savage was doing at this time, but he was certainly there and involved. He even appears in one of the photos in the book (police herding punks off the boat after the infamous Jubilee cruise down the Thames, if I recall rightly). His recollections and interviews are interspersed with snippets from his diary from the time. This really is a vivid account, and one that made me curse all the more loudly that I missed the action.

One warning - I thought there was far, far too much about Malcolm McLaren's pre-Pistols activities at the start of the book. This was boring. But fight through it, or skip ahead, you'll really miss out if you get bored and quit in the first couple of chapters.

Also, after reading this book, try to check out Julien Temple's film "The Filth And The Fury" - you'll see footage of a lot of the events described herein.

'England's Dreaming - Sex Pistols and Punk Rock' by Jon Savage is first and foremost a story about the formation of the Sex Pistols. The book starts with a young and ambitious Malcolm Mclaren - inspired by the Parisian student revolts of 1968 - and Vivienne Westwood who, together with Mclaren, created the 'Sex' shop which provided the backdrop to the formation of the Sex Pistols and delivered the aesthetic which symbolised and communicated most directly what punk stood for. A story which, in this case, ends in effect with the predictable demise of Sid Vicious, who in the end came to symbolise more than anything else what Punk Rock meant in the eyes of the mainstream (and to paraphrase Shakespeare) 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'

The greatness of this book is that while ostensibly this is a book about the Sex Pistols (and it is) it is much more than that. As someone born in 1980 it is easy to forget that Britain in the 1970s was such a Politicised place, today apathy rules ok, but thirty years ago things were different. The Post War consensus was crumbling, the age of Thatcherism was dawning, the promise of full employment was exposed as a lie as unemployment figures grew, the once proud ruler of most of the worlds surface had to go with begging bowl to the IMF for a loan, union power was rampant, strikes ubiqutious, the far right increasingly evident and, in the words of Savage 'political and social (even behavioural) extremism seemed very attractive as a way out of this impasse.' In other words the time was ripe for Punk.

The history of the Sex Pistols in the 1970s is the history of the U.K in the 1970s, this is what Savage conveys, Punk grew in fertile soil. The word most used in this book is NIHILISM. Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that that the world and espiecally human existence is without objective meaning, purpose or comprehensible truth or essential value. The nihilism of punk was a reaction to the idealism of the hippies who had preceded them and to many proved frightening, but while the life of Sid Vicious showed one obvious consequence of nihilism, Savage manages to convey the less obvious flip side: only by negating what has gone before can one create afresh. The concequence of the Sex Pistols was that in this country, musically, things were never the same again.

This book deserves every one of the accolades it was awarded at the time. It is a meticulously researched and lucidly written account of the genesis, development and ultimate demise of the late 70s "punk rock" movement spearheaded by The Sex Pistols, a group of working class urchins from London, and their street hustler manager Malcolm McLaren. The casual reader will be more interested in the narratives dealing with McLaren's activities on the avant garde fringe of the sex fetish/fashion industry and the Pistols' rise from a bunch of talentless roughnecks hanging around London's pub rock scene to global notoriety as purveyors of snarling 2 chord nihilism, social antagonism and aggression.
Savage presents near definitive accounts of the early bust ups with law enforcement, the Bill Grundy show expletives episode (which made the Pistols tabloid fodder for the next 2 years), EMI's dumping of the band (which actually hurt the company more than the band), the controversy over "God Save The Queen" (the true No 1 record in the country during Jubilee week in 1977), the chaotic tours, mutual loathing of John Lydon and McLaren and the demise of Sid Vicious from a vulnerable, impressionable teenager to a self-destructive manic depressive hooked for life on hard drugs to the extent that one morning in October 1978 he finds himself charged with knifing his junkie girlfriend in the stomach after a row about their latest smack deal.
However, I was most interested in Savage's eloquent passages about the historical and cultural context of the Pistols and punk rock generally. Early in the book he talks about how post-war mass consumer enfranchisement was exposed as a sham by the 1970s and how the country's social life had degenerated into warring factions. This was the cradle where punk was born. On the Pistols' music he observes that at a time "when songs generally dealt with the pop archetypes of escape or love, they threw up a series of insults and rejections, couched in a new pop language that was tersely allusive yet recognizable as everyday speech". Later he argues that the band were "the last gasp of youth as a single unifying force", that they "reasserted the primacy of pop as the divining rod of the times at the very moment when they predicted its loss of power in the 1980s, weakened by power politics, cynicism and demographics" and that they "said "No" so forcefully the world had been forced to listen". And on that theme he concludes his wonderfully intelligent book writing thus "History is made by those who say "No" and Punk's utopian heresies remain its gift to the world".